School of Seven Bells

Andrew P Street speaks with School of Seven Bells' co-vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Alejandra Deheza about learning to rock out, and getting some downtime.  

For a band with so many electronics going on, I was very surprised how hard School of Seven Bells rocked when you were last down here.
Wait 'til you see us with a drummer. It's going to be sick. We've had maybe a few shows already with the drums and it's just like "wow – it gets even louder on stage!" That makes you go "wait a minute - the drums are louder so I have to be louder too!"

I bet Benjamin [Curtis, guitars, late of Secret Machines] particularly enjoys that.
Oh, are you kidding? Please – it's like heaven for him!

The biggest surprise on the new album, though, were the rhythms: it's a very dancefloor-friend album. The drum machine fills on Dust Devil reminded me of Confusion by New Order, those tumbling toms...
Yeah, oh my god I know. Benjamin produced all of those beats and the first time I heard them, I was like "damn, that sounds like Madonna toms or something!" [laughs] It's so ballsy: I love that sound, on Dust Devil especially. That's actually one of my favourite songs on the record.

What was the writing philosophy this time around?
A lot of it does have to do with playing the songs live. Because when we wrote [debut album] Alpinisms, not only was that pretty much the first time we were all writing together and just kind of figuring out what we sounded like but we were all trying to figure out how we got along idea-wise and stuff like that. It wasn't until touring them that we figured out how to play them live, because none of were like "oh, this is the guitar part, this is the bassline, this is whatever". We basically rewrote the songs to play live. Whereas this record, because we were playing out so much, we all got very into the zone of being on stage and what things sounded like exactly as we were writing them. It was a way more direct approach - a completely different way to see things. And it was written for playing loud, a lot of it. And of course we all love dance music. We had so much opportunity to just be in different sound systems everywhere and hearing all of the different artists vocally. Just being in different cities all the time, we were exposed to a lot of really great music.

That sounds very inspiring.
You don't really have a lot of time to sit and process what you've been going through because you're always going, going, going – so when you come up with something, you put it down then. And it has a sense of this really immediate satisfaction and that's what we wanted.

Do the songs sit well together on stage, between the two records?
Oh yeah, definitely. Especially because we've adjusted the way we play the Alpinisms songs live, so it's all coming from the same place. 

Have you had a chance to look at the line up for Splendour in the Grass?
You know what? I haven't even checked what the line up is for that. I mean I know it's a really awesome festival. I'm really happy to be playing it, actually. We didn't get to do festivals in Australia last time. Last time we just blew through it just because we had been on tour and we had no downtime at all. And it's like a haze to me still to look back on it. I don't even remember the flight, I don't even know what was going on. I remember sleeping but I couldn't tell when I wasn't. But the shows were great – the shows were a lot of fun.

Do you get any downtime on this visit?
For this time around that we're going there's space. We're actually going to get to decompress. I really want to see a lot more over there than I got to the last time so we're definitely going to schedule some of that in there.

Disconnect from Desire is out through Speak n Spell/Inertia